The Shunned House
Few horror stories are as deeply personal as "The Shunned House." Lovecraft set this tale in his own Providence, Rhode Island, on a street he walked daily, and the result is something more claustrophobic and intimate than his later cosmic epics. An unnamed narrator and his elderly uncle move into a decaying colonial home with a notorious history: generations of tenants have died or gone mad, their faces drained of vitality, their ends accompanied by a terrible, sweetish odor. The uncle, driven by scholarly curiosity, begins researching the house's dark legacy while strange sounds echo from the cellar and spectral faces materialize at windows. What unfolds is creeping, psychological dread rather than explosive horror. The entity they eventually encounter is neither fully ghost nor alien god, but something parasitic and ancient, feeding on the living. The climax is visceral and desperate, culminating in a fire that the narrator hopes will purge the land of its curse. For Lovecraft completists and anyone who appreciates slow-burn New England gothic, this is essential reading. It shows a master refining his craft, building atmosphere with patient, deliberate prose before revealing what lurks beneath.
Editions
X-Ray
“Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,And with strange aeons even death may die.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly and insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter; existing very infrequently in three-dimensional space because of its more intimate connexion with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us occasional manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage-point, may never hope to understand.””
— H. P. Lovecraft
“It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone;””
— H. P. Lovecraft
